UK spent $15.6 million guarding embassy housing Julian Assange

The costs amount to more than $15,000 daily to monitor WikiLeaks founder.

Scotland Yard has spent at least $15.6 million guarding the Ecuadorean embassy in London where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been holed up for nearly 1,000 days.

Assange was granted asylum there and could be arrested if he leaves the embassy. Swedish authorities want to question him about an alleged sexual assault in Stockholm in 2010; he says the sex was consensual. A Swedish court upheld an arrest warrant last year, and British courts have said he should be extradited to Sweden.

"[Sweden is] hardly an illiberal rogue state. Of course the right thing for him to do is face justice in a country where due process is well established," British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said Thursday.

The costs, more than $15,000 daily, cover policing and overtime. The figures were first reported by LBC Radio of London, which obtained the data under open records laws. The station said the price tag, at least through October 2014, amounted to the cost of 343 patrol officers for a year.

"It is embarrassing to see the UK government spending more on surveillance and detaining an uncharged political refugee than on its investigation into the Iraq war, which killed hundreds of thousands," Kristinn Hrafnsson, a WikiLeaks spokesman, said.

Assange has not been formally charged with a crime. According to Assange's own September 2013 affidavit, he said that the women he slept with specifically said they were not accusing him of rape and that police “made up the charges.”

If extradited to Sweden, the 43-year-old Assange fears he might then be sent to the United States and prosecuted for posting classified US military documents on the secret-spilling site.

In a September telephone interview with Ars, the Australian briefly spoke of being trapped in the embassy. "For security reasons, I can't tell you which sections of the embassy I utilize," he said. "As to the rest, in a way, it's a perfectly normal situation. In another way, it's one of the most abnormal, unusual situations that someone can find themselves in."

The US government's WikiLeaks investigation began in 2010 after WikiLeaks distributed tens of thousands of US secrets obtained by Chelsea Manning, an Army private sentenced to 35 years in prison after being convicted of espionage and other charges. In addition to leaking thousands of diplomatic documents, Manning's most famous leak was a video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack that killed civilians and a Reuters journalist in Iraq. The video ultimately became known as the "collateral murder" video.

Google, meanwhile, said last month that it handed over data to US authorities about three WikiLeaks staffers as part of the government's espionage probe of Assange and the site.

David Kravets
The senior editor for Ars Technica. Founder of TYDN fake news site. Technologist. Political scientist. Humorist. Dad of two boys. Been doing journalism for so long I remember manual typewriters with real paper. Emaildavid.kravets@arstechnica.com//Twitter@dmkravets